[OmniOS-discuss] Recommended way to keep Zones up to date?

[Philippe]

Thanks for the clear explanation Eric. I makes me feel better about having the right procedure in place. The Solaris docs are great, but sometimes it is difficult to know for sure whether you are missing an important step or not…

My problem was indeed about the 'entire' package. Not sure where to find the logs now though. I ended up recreating the zones from scratch, which ended up surprisingly quick and simple since I had automation for it and the zones do enforce a clean separation between O.S. install and user data. Thank you OmniOS ;-)

Thanks again Eric,
- Philippe

On May 1, 2013, at 8:35 AM, Eric Sproul wrote:

> On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Philippe <philippe.hanrigou at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> <noob question>
>> What is the recommended way to update the packages in the global and non global zones?
>> </noob question>
> 
> A perfectly legitimate question, regardless of experience. :)
> 
>> I used to just run 'pkg update' in the global zone and then in each of the non-global zones. Since it is cumbersome, and the non global zones would always complain about not being able to update the boot environment, I googled around and decided to try the 'zoneadm -z my-zone detach' / 'zoneadm -z my-zone attach -u' strategy described in http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/updatesoftwarezones-450942.html#Upgrading. Not only it seemed non ideal to have to bring the zone offline, but once I detached it my zone would never attach again due to some incorporation problem that I could not troubleshoot due to my limited IPS understanding.
> 
> Using detach/'attach -u' is the recommended way to move zones between
> stable releases of OmniOS.  Within a given stable release, a simple
> 'pkg update' from within the zone will suffice.  We try very hard not
> to introduce breaking changes in core within a single release cycle.
> 
> Your issue with reattaching sounds like the attaching zone has a
> different version of the 'entire' package than the global zone (you'll
> see this in the output of the attach operation, and it also goes into
> the attach log).  Did you upgrade the global at some point after the
> zone in question was created?  If you could paste a copy of the attach
> log where you see the failure, that would help.
> 
>> 
>> So my question is what is the best practice here? What should I have been doing all along (ideally without taking downtime)?
> 
> You should be able to run 'pkg update' within the zone for most
> updates.  Only when moving between releases will you need to
> detach/attach.
> 
> Eric